--that, in all departments of life, men and women, made from
the first to be co-mates and partners, should stand side by side,
and work hand to hand. Not because men and women are identical,
not because they are not different, but because they are
different; because each has a special quality running through the
whole organization of the man and the woman, which quality is
needed to make a complete manhood and womanhood. And then there
is another proposition, which is this: that whatever any human
being can do well, that being has a right to do, and the ability
of any person marks the sphere of that person. ("Hear"--"hear").
This, I say, I count to be strictly a self-evident proposition.
(Applause). If you want to know what the level of water is at any
particular spot upon the face of the earth, you do not force the
water up with a force-pump, you do not build a great reservoir
with high stone walls, to hold it, you simply leave it alone, and
it finds its level. So, if you want to know what is the true
sphere of man or woman, just leave the man or the woman alone,
and the natural law, and the divine law, which can not be broken,
and which are as sure in the moral and human world as they are in
the external world, will settle the matter. If you want to know,
really and sincerely, what woman's sphere is, leave her
unhampered and untrammeled, and her own powers will find that
sphere. She may make mistakes, and try, as man often does, to do
things which she can not, but the experiment will settle the
matter; and nothing can be more absurd than for man, especially,
_a priori_, to establish the limits which shall bound woman's
sphere, or for woman, as a mere matter of speculation, to debate
what her sphere shall be, since the natural laws are revealed,
not to speculation, but to action.

The obstacle to the progress of the simple ideas which underlie
this movement and to their being carried out into practice, I
take to be nothing else than this--the _vis inertiae_ of
prejudice, the dead-weight of the customary and familiar--that
which has been; and that is simply the dead-weight which hangs
upon the wheels of every movement of reform. A thing has not not
been, it is not customary, it is strange, it disturbs our
ordinary modes of thought, and we will